The Oppositelock handbook has been updated, edited and revised. The current version is available here. This version is being preserved for reference purposes.

While we wait for the "official" rules of the OppositeLock Community to be finalized, I figured that it couldn't hurt to publish a semi-official guide that is for the general commenting community here.

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With apologies and thanks to Slay Belle, the rules basically can be summed up thusly:

And don’t be a shit-stirrer either (here or elsewhere that will lead back to Oppo. Specifically this entails no trolling, no troll parties, no burner baiting and no Jez baiting).

NSFW in Replies (if you have doubts whether it's NSFW, it is. This includes nudity, real or implied, gore or anything else that might get someone in trouble if their boss caught them reading it at work, assuming that you are allowed to browse the internet at work).

Political / Sensitive topics in a reply

OppositeLock is a forum for everyone that happens to have a very obvious and intentional leaning toward subjects focused mainly on all things automotive, mechanical and generally of interest to folks who love all manner of contraptions that move. However, that doesn't limit us to only those topics. We're all humans here. We have lives, we will probably talk about them in detail. But this community is for everyone. Seriously. If there are commenters from Groupthink/Jezebel who want to talk cars or pick our collective minds on the best planes from World War II? Awesome. The same goes for everybody else from anywhere else. I have, and will continue to welcome anyone who shows interest in joining and contributing / building our community.

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However, That is not to say that ‘everyone’ will initially get author access or that ‘everyone’ will be approved. In practice, unless we know you to be a troll by name, and you have not expressed a desire to join our community and understand that your prior behavior will probably, at least initially, color the reactions to you (we can, and do forgive, we rarely forget), we'll probably add anyone who asks to join. I want to make clear that while this isn't Jalopnik, we do still mainly talk about cars and car related subjects, that this is an offtopic forum that is a general purpose space and, accordingly, our aim is to make this a welcoming place that people feel comfortable interacting with each other in.

In order to accomplish this, we strongly discourage people from making posts attacking other commenters, starting inter-forum pissing contests, and purposefully picking fights with people you don’t get along with.

We are not asking that everyone get along. We are not banning cathartic ranting. But we are asking that authors on this forum maybe think twice before posting about how much they hate Commenter X, especially when they know Commenter X will see the post, and everyone will start bitching about everyone else. No one enjoys seeing that go down. It’s awkward, it’s embarrassing, and most importantly, it damages the community.

A major point of clarification. The moderators are not here to censor unpopular opinions. We are not asking you to post only along certain political views. We are not asking you to refrain from discussing touchy subjects. The mods are not here to police your views. For the most part (see above) talk about anything you want – make your points respectfully and clearly, accept that not everyone will agree with what you have to say, and understand that this is an open forum where a lot of different kinds of people will read your post. But above all, don't be a dick.

The Moderators

I am one of the moderators. I am not the owner of the forum, that particular role belongs to Porsche9146. There are a handful of moderators here and an incomplete list of them is as follows: Nobody, Dusty Ventures, pauljones, Crown Victor Victoria, Party-vi, More Power, Axel-ripper, Brian, the life of, Das Wauto and Jagvar. As moderators, our goal is to essentially be invisible when we are in that role, occasionally reminding people of the rules, and our expected primary public function is welcoming newcomers and adding users to the community.

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The launch of Kinja has given you, the commenters, access to a number of tools that used to be admin-only. This means less work for us, but it also means that you, the commenters, need to be more responsible for your conversations on this board. If someone is harassing you in response to something you wrote? Dismiss them (not sure how to dismiss? look at this comment). If the conversation is unproductive, walk away. If someone is chiding you for cursing too much, dismiss them and walk away. Basically, we expect you all to act like adults and therefor to handle conflict like adults (This applies even if you are not technically an adult).

Thank You Spiegs for allowing me to demonstrate the appropriate time and place to use the dismiss…

If you run into a situation that you are unsure of how to handle, or if you find a troll or have a persistent issue with another commenter, feel free to contact any of the mods for assistance. You can find us on-site or email us at oppomoderator@gmail.com or contact us on Twitter

Posting Access

There are two main levels of posting access to Oppo. One is the basic commenter and the other is authorship privileges.

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Like on the main page, anyone is free to comment on any thread on Oppo. If you are not ‘followed’ by Oppo, your comment will show up as ‘grey’. This is not a judgment on your worth as a person or a commenter; it is simply how Kinja works.

Authorship privileges are granted by the mods. If you wish to post to Oppositelock, respond to one of our semi-regular request threads. You may not get authorship the first time you ask, but you are welcome to request again at any point. (See any request post for expanded details on this process.) Authors are able to follow/unfollow commenters on behalf of ‘Oppositelock’. ‘Following’ moves a commenter from a ‘grey’ to a ‘black’. We trust authors enough to not need our permission to ‘follow’ a commenter – we wouldn’t have made you authors if we didn’t trust you in the first place. However, any author found to be abusing their posting access to mess with other commenter’s status on Oppo will have their authorship revoked, and possibly banned from the forum.

Anything else I can clarify while we wait for the "official" rules? Let me know and I, or one of the other mods will respond to you.

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(Originally posted 9/11/13, up to date as of 10/8/13) - New Version published 2/27/2014